Country Background:
Population: 13 million
Per capita GDP: $2,000
Size: between Missouri and Oklahoma
Currency: Riel, 4,000 per US dollar. US dollars are commonly accepted and usually preferred. We never used riels during our short stay.
Independence: 1953 from France
Language: Khmer (official). English is common. French spoken occasionally.
Itinerary:
Vietnam Airlines flight from Saigon, Vietnam to Siem Reap, Cambodia
Siem Reap
Thursday, May 5, 2005 - Saturday, May 7, 2005
Two nights at Raffles Grand Hotel D'Angkor
Temperature high/low during our stay: 105/80
Population: 85,000 (according to August 2002 Lonely Planet), and exploding
Siem Reap is adjacent to the world-renowned temples of Angkor, built during the 8th through the 13th centuries. As an archaeological site, Angkor belongs in the group of world wonders, such as Egyptian pyramids, Machu Picchu, and the Taj Mahal.
The most famous temple is Angkor Wat, and this name is often used (incorrectly) by tourists as the place name for the entire area. Angkor Wat is just one of a number of fabulous temples--Angkor Thom, Phnom Bakheng, Praeh Khan, Ta Phrom, and many others--all next to each other. Angkor Wat is the biggest temple, with the highest quality workmanship, and remains the best preserved. According to Robert Kaplan in "The Ends of the Earth," "It is the single largest religious building in the world, built by the Khmer king Suriyavarman II between 1113 and 1150 A.D. The compound comprising Angkor Wat is 960 meters--or over ten football fields--long and 800 meters wide. It is completely surrounded by a rectangular moat, nearly a mile long from west to east, and three quarters of a mile from north to south." According to Kaplan, it covers almost four times the ground space of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, with almost as much stone, and was completed in only 37 years. Unlike the pyramids, though, all of the stone at Angkor Wat is intricately decorated with stone carvings.
During the second half of the 1970s, Cambodia was the worst place on earth to live. If you are reading this, had you been Cambodian during this time, you most likely would have been murdered. All teachers, writers, businesspeople and for good measure anyone who wore glasses--a sign of being an intellectual--were wiped out, often along with their families. Out of a population of 8 million at the time, 1-3 million died, depending on which estimate you read. Education, money, mail service, and newspapers were eliminated. The calendar was turned back to year 0 on April 17, 1975 by the Khmer Rouge on the day they seized power. 2000 years of Cambodian history no longer mattered--the world was beginning over again, at least that was the Khmer Rogue rationale. Entire cities were emptied, as all citizens were forced to work on agricultural communes. The population of the capital city, Phnom Penh, dropped to around 15,000. It is now over 1 million.
All of this was in the name of creating a communist utopia. The Khmer Rouge, under their leader, Pol Pot, took control of the country 13 days before Saigon fell in neighboring Vietnam. The dominos were falling. The genocide in Cambodia was so extreme, however, that it was the Vietnamese communists of all people, who put a stop to it when they invaded Cambodia in late 1978. It seems farcical today to learn that most of the world, including the US, denounced Vietnam's invasion and continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot as the legitimate rulers of Cambodia, even though they were now in hiding in the jungle while Vietnam ran the country. China, fearing a resurgent Vietnam on its border and also to protest Vietnam's poor treatment of ethnic Chinese, decided to teach Vietnam a lesson, invading it in early 1979, but this action never really amounted to much.
Vietnam pulled out of Cambodia in 1989, no longer being able to afford the occupation, as it was no longer receiving Soviet largesse (see our belt joke in our last post). In 1993, the UN spent $2 billion to sponsor free elections, at that time the most costly UN effort ever. By March 1999, the remaining Khmer Rouge elements were killed, captured, or surrendered. Gradually, Cambodia was returning to a civilized state. With peace and increased security, the tourists began arriving to one of the great archaeological sites in the world. Whereas backpacking through Cambodia even ten years ago was still a life-or-death proposition, today millions of tourists visit Cambodia without a concern.
Kaplan describes Siem Reap in the mid-1990s as a town "with a primitive airport, dirt roads, no computers, intermittent electricity, and a grand hotel whose seedy rattan interior was decorated with out-of-focus tourist posters." Today, the restored Grand Hotel is a five-star luxury experience. According to our guide, there are now 81 hotels in Siem Reap, up from 12 in 2000. Nevertheless, that's not enough capacity for expected future growth, and new hotels are opening every month. The primitive airport is modernized, and an additional new terminal is being built. Our guide pointed out that basics such as running water and electricity (instead of private wells and generators) were put in place in the last two years. The dirt roads are being paved and expanded. "I am so glad to see these things happening," said our guide, "because for half my life nothing good occurred."
Considering that things could not have been worse in Cambodia just over 25 years ago, it is remarkable where they are today. Granted, we saw only the main tourist area, but still it is amazing to consider. The country does have centuries of cultural and language to fall back upon, and it is well located economically with booming Vietnam and Thailand as neighbors.
Comparing and contrasting Siem Reap to Calafate, Argentina provides an interesting perspective. Both are booming tourist areas adjacent to world-class attractions (glaciers in the case of Calafate), that have been discovered by mass tourism over the past five years. The infrastructure in both places is struggling to keep pace with the growth. A new dirt road one year may be paved the next, and become a four-lane highway the year after that. The pace and scale of Siem Reap's development exceeds that of Calafate, however. Most of the new hotels in Calafate are small and locally owned by Argentines. Only now are foreign hotels tentatively beginning to enter Calafate. In contrast, Siem Reap's hotels are bigger and foreign operators are here. Argentina is a more developed country, but the nature of hotel development in these two places seems to be the reverse of what you would expect. We suspect the lingering impact of Argentina's debt default and hostile treatment of foreign investors has retarded entry of foreign operators into Calafate.
Our Siem Reap guide, Chen Sekhoeun, or Hoeun for short, is 37 years old. In 1975, at the age of 7, his family was separated, with his mother, father, brother, and he sent to four different camps to work. He had to work all day long for three years and eight months, until the Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge back to the jungle. Hoeun described the Cambodians love/hate relationship with the Vietnamese. "Helping is helping, but invading is still invading."
Hoeun's family was reunited, but his grandfather and uncle were killed. Hoeun went back to school through junior high, which was all that was available to him since all of the teachers were dead. He himself became a teacher, eventually teaching physics and math. He learned English in a "street school" where for a few dollars you could get four hours of instruction at a time. He quit teaching in 2000 for the more lucrative profession of tourism. (This is a common theme throughout developing countries. Because of the hard currency tips from western travelers, many professionals in poor countries go into tourism, as it is often the highest paying job available. In Cuba, for example, many former medical doctors are now tour guides.)
The story of Cambodia's genocide is told in the movie, "The Killing Fields." Many scenes from a less serious movie, "Tomb Raider," were filmed in the Angkor temples.
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